Day: January 1, 2005

While down in TN, my dad was trying to get his home network going again. It HAD beein working great, but he had some DSL problems and he also had to reload Windows 2000 again after experiencing virus-like behavior, that effectively shutdown his network. It turns out that it was a McAfee Firewall problem. And the only way to get rid of it was to reload Windows. How do you like that – Anti-virus software that acts like a virus! This has me sworn off any McAfee products. I’m using AVG Free and I love it.

I’m not much with home networks because we only have one computer–a 350MHz Compaq Presario circa 1998. (Ok, ok, yes we need to upgrade.) But have done some basic networking stuff at work. How hard could it be?

Anyway, he could get both computers on the network out the the Internet, but couldn’t share files or printers. It turnes out that you need the NetBIOS settings to be set the same (i.e. default-Get settings from DHCP server) in both computers.

We decided that because he was using a wireless router with a firewall, that he no longer needed his McAfee firewall stuff (who would load that up again?). And he’s now using AVG.

Any suggestions for the best network/router settings for a home network?

The week before Christmas was a fairly relaxing and quiet week for our family, but the week after Christmas has been quite busy (which is strange because it usually is the other way around). I haven’t had a chance to do much blogging.

Brief update:
The Monday after Christmas, we went to East Tennessee to visit my family. It was a good visit, but wasn’t what I would call restful. Lot’s of good food and fun time, though.

We got back on Thursday afternoon. About 6pm, I got a call from work. The first words were: “I thought you were out of town.” And believe me I wish I had been. I had to go in for 4 hours to troubleshoot a customer problem. Didn’t figure it out, but they called in some others to look at it on Friday and I was just on call. Luckily, I didn’t get called again.

Friday, I worked on the sound system at church–we were transfering all the equipment to new racks to but in a new sound booth. I planned to take 4 hours: 2 to put the racks and tables together and 2 to put the equipment into the new racks. 9 hours later, I was done. How come you always underestimate on jobs like this?

Search for:

Email Subscription

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.